My Thoughts on the Changing World

Every day I seem to run into new issues where I need to reexamine what I know about the world. It's a very complex world, and getting more and more complex every day. So, I'm going to comment on it here.

Friday, December 29, 2017

I was surprised to see on the news a couple months ago that a conference of people who believe the earth is flat was held inRaleigh, North Carolina, on Nov. 9-10, 2017. It was a sold-out event, with about 400 people attending. The image above is the shape of the earth as most of them see it. The white band around the edge is the "ice wall" (known to everyone else as "Antarctica") that keeps people and the oceans from falling over the edge.

I also found that there are many web sites run by Flat Earthers, and they also have many YouTube videos where they explain their beliefs. One Flat Earther, Eric Dubay, has a 35 page "book" in which he presents "200
Proofs Earth is Not a Spinning Ball."Four of his more interesting "proofs" are #44, #46, #47 and #48. Here they are:

44) If Earth was a ball, and Antarctica was too cold to fly over, the only logical way to fly from Sydney to Santiago would be a straight shot over the Pacific staying in the Southern hemisphere the entire way. Re-fueling could be done in New Zealand or other Southern hemisphere destinations along the way if absolutely necessary. In actual fact, however, Santiago-Sydney flights go into the Northern hemisphere making stop-overs at LAX and other North American airports before continuing back down to the Southern hemisphere. Such ridiculously wayward detours make no sense on the globe but make perfect sense and form nearly straight lines when shown on a flat Earth map.

46) On a ball-Earth Cape
Town, South Africa to Buenos Aries,
Argentina should be a straight shot over the
Atlantic following the same line of latitude
across, but instead every flight goes to
connecting locations in the Northern
hemisphere first, stopping over anywhere
from London to Turkey to Dubai. Once again
these make absolutely no sense on the globe
but are completely understandable options
when mapped on a flat Earth.

47) On a ball-Earth
Johannesburg, South Africa to Sao Paolo,
Brazil should be a quick straight shot along
the 25th Southern latitude, but instead
nearly every flight makes a re-fueling stop
at the 50th degree North latitude in London
first! The only reason such a ridiculous
stop-over works in reality is because the
Earth is flat.

48) On a ball-Earth Santiago, Chile to Johannesburg, South Africa should be an easy flight all taking place below the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern hemisphere, yet every listed flight makes a curious re-fueling stop in Senegal near the Tropic of Cancer in the North hemisphere first! When mapped on a flat Earth the reason why is clear to see, however, Senegal is actually directly in a straight-line path half-way between the two.

They are all basically both the same argument. They just use different locations. I found a graphic that some Flat Earthers use to illustrate this argument. Here it is:

Note
that the routes were clearly chosen so that they would
cross Antarctica, and they ignore shorter, actual
airline routes that go to and from the places
depicted and do not require flying
over Antarctica. Moreover, the route they show from San Paolo, Brazil, to Perth, Australia, which goes closest to the South Pole, would be a 9,240 mile trip, and the range of a Boeing 747-400 is just 8,380 miles.

I did a little research and found that, contrary to the claims in the illustration and in the "proofs," anyone who has the money can fly around the earth (and around Antarctica) on commercial flights. And it can be done on just 4 hops:

Total distance: 20,213 miles.Total cost: $5,913On a projected map with the South Pole in the center, the 4 hops look like this:

On the Flat Earth map, however, the 4 hops look like this:

And that is where the absurdity of the Flat Earth theory can be clearly seen. To get from Sydney to Santiago, you have to fly across the flat earth world, passing over Los Angeles, California! There doesn't seem to be any way to measure distances on the Flat Earth map, but on a globe, a flight from Sydney to Santiago that passes over Los Angeles would be 13,084 miles, much farther than directly from Sydney to Santiago on a globe, and far beyond the range of a Boeing 747-400.

And, of course, when flying on the flat earth from Johannesburg to Sydney, you would fly over Saudi Arabia and China. On a globe, the flight is mostly over the Indian Ocean.

The question then becomes: When people take these flat earth flights, how is it they do not notice that they are flying over land when they should be flying over the ocean? And how do they make it in one hop if the distance is greater than the distance the plane can fly without refueling? Do the Flat Earthers believe all the passengers are hypnotized or drugged as soon as they get aboard?

Or maybe the Flat Earthers are just incapable of understanding simple logic.

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

As I see it, the answer to the question is clearly "NO." Some people agree. But, it seems that many other people on the Internet strongly disagree. And the TV show "Mythbusters" agreed with the naysayers.

This is an analysis of the dispute. The question and illustration above are what Albert Einstein would have called a "gedanken," or a "thought experiment." It is probably impractical or far too expensive to perform in real life, but there is nothing to stop the experiment from being performed in our imaginations. You just need to have an imagination.

This is how the "thought experiment" works:

We have a 747 setting on a conveyor belt. There is a wind sock or flag next to the conveyor belt which hangs limp, indicating there is no wind blowing. Since "the conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction," the flag pole can be used as a guide to assure this happens. When the plane starts to move, the flag pole will get farther away unless the conveyor belt also moves to keep the plane in the same place. So, we need some kind of device that makes sure the airplane always remains in the same spot. That way, the conveyor belt will "exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction."

The pilot of the plane can push his throttles full forward, and the conveyor belt will compensate to keep the plane in the same place, the speed of the wheels exactly matching the speed of the conveyor belt.

Can the plane take off? Of course not. It is basically just standing still. It cannot get any lift. There is no air rushing across the wings to create low pressure atop the wings to lift the plane. That is what the "thought experiment" was designed to illustrate.

So, how can anyone possibly disagree with this?

Mostly they disagree because they misunderstand it. Many disagree because they consider the "thought experiment" to be impossible, and they create a different experiment that they agree with.

The "thought experiment" might have been easier to understand if the pilot was in control of the experiment instead of the conveyor belt. That way, the conveyor belt can be set to just run faster and faster until it reaches about 200 mph or beyond normal takeoff speed.

When the conveyor belt starts moving, the pilot will see the flag pole moving away from him, indicating that his plane is being hauled backwards. He can then add power to his engines to compensate, keeping the flag at the same angle to the aircraft. As the conveyor belt moves faster and faster, the pilot applies more and more power to the engines which generate more and more thrust. But the weight of the plane on the conveyor belt remains the same. No air moves across the wings, so the plane does not lift and cannot take off. If the conveyor belt reaches 200 or 300 or 500 miles per hour, the plane will still be in the same spot. All the engines are doing is preventing the the airplane from moving backwards. The wheels will be flattened on the bottom just as if the plane was parked.

In reality, of course, the constant flexing of the rubber in the tires as they rotate under the full weight of the plane at high speeds would cause the tires to overheat and burst, and the engines would also overheat and either shut down or explode because they are designed to fly best in the cold air of higher altitudes. But the plane would not take off.

What are the arguments from the naysayers? The first argument (on a web site HERE) is "The wording of this quiz is wrong and makes it physically impossible," and "we can not design the conveyor belt to move at the same speed as wheels." In effect, he admits that the plane cannot take off unless you reword the "thought experiment" to allow it. He argues that the way the thought experiment is phrased does not allow for an imbalance of forces to move the plane forward.

So, he wants the experiment done the way it was done on Mythbusters. And he includes a link to the Mythbusters episode about the thought experiment:

But the Mythbusters experiment did not have a conveyor belt. They had a long canvas cloth laying on pavement. And a truck pulling the cloth under the plane is supposed to simulate a conveyor belt. But, it doesn't, because the weight of the plane is being held up by solid earth, not by the cloth and not by any conveyor belt.

When power is applied to the engine in the video, the plane can be seen to move almost normally relative to the traffic cones marking the side of the runway. And the plane took off. Why? Because it wasn't the experiment in the original question. The plane was moving across the stationary earth, not sitting on a moving conveyor belt. The cloth was being pulled out from under the plane, but the cloth was very long and therefore flexible enough to have little effect on the movement of the plane. That flexibility allowed the wheels to turn at the speed the plane moved relative to the earth. And the plane is allowed to move forward, almost as if the cloth wasn't there. They should have had high-speed cameras and marks on the tires to record the speed of the wheels versus the speed of the cloth and the speed of the ground. That would have shown that the plane moved almost as if the cloth wasn't there, totally ignoring the experiment.

Another web page HERE also argues that the original question is not realistic, and it also argues that if the conveyor belt is moving fast enough it will drag air with it and give the airplane the lift it needs to take off. That is highly doubtful, since the air being dragged will be very close to the earth and certainly won't be going OVER the wings, creating low pressure, which is what is needed to give the plane LIFT and allow it to take off.

As I see it, the question is HYPOTHETICAL. It is a "gedanken" thought experiment. As it is stated in the original question, the plane cannot take off. If you change the question and add other conditions, then you aren't answering the question. You are just arguing.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

I've been trying to restrain myself, but I keep
thinking I need to write a comment about
President Donald Trump's screwball claim that he
was wiretapped by President Obama. It's
just one straw too many. So, here's my
comment.

In the days since Trump’s tweets
alleging the wiretapping were posted, the
White House has called for a congressional
investigation, declined to comment, dodged
questions, pointed to media reports that don’t
contain the information aides say they do and
analyzed the president’s use of quotation
marks — all while doubling down on his claim
without providing any evidence.

While doing research, I found this cartoon:

I keep thinking that President Trump simply
cannot think logically, he only thinks
emotionally. Evidence obviously has no
meaning to him. Only his beliefs have
meaning. If there's no evidence of wire
tapping, that just means the FBI hasn't looked
hard enough to find the evidence that Trump
believes must exist.

How can President Trump believe the evidence must
exist? Because some staffer comment or
news article or email or idea convinced him to
believe it. And once he believed it, it
becomes an emotional conclusion. What he
believes cannot be wrong, since that would mean
he is not as smart as he thinks he is.

There is no middle ground for those who think
emotionally. Those who think emotionally must
be right, and the only acceptable alternative is
that the world must be conspiring
against them to maliciously argue something is
wrong that must with absolute
certainty be right. If something they
argued for turns out to be a failure, it is
always the fault of those ignorant and malicious
people who disagreed with them.

This topic has special meaning to me because
I spent over a decade arguing with people who
believed that Muslims sent the anthrax letters,
even though all
the evidence clearly said the letters were
sent by an American scientist.
And those
True Believers are still out there arguing
the same things they argued ten years ago.
No facts or evidence will ever change their
minds. And, of course, they have no facts
or evidence to support their beliefs. As
with Trump, they want the FBI to find the facts
and evidence for them. They are just
absolutely certain that there is
evidence out there somewhere that will confirm
their unshakable beliefs.

It also seems that if these True Believers have
one totally unsupported belief, they also have
others. And they are totally certain about
all of them. The absurd claims were
probably never more absurd than when Trump
argued that millions of people voted illegally
in the election he won.

From my observations, it
appears that Trump was elected by people who
think the way he does, people who think
emotionally, not logically. Were they
driven by a hatred of foreigners, a fear of
foreigners or a hatred of the government in
general? Maybe a bit of all three.
All that appears certain is that were
"fed up" and wanted to elect a fast-talking
game show host to straighten out the
situation. Trump told them what they
wanted to hear, and they believed him.

Another thing that
Donald Trump has made very clear is that he had
absolutely no idea how complicated politics can
be. He was probably the only person in
America who thought that replacing "Obamacare"
would be a simple task.

I'm reminded of a comment in Eric Hoffer's book
"The True Believer" which saidthe only way to change a True
Believer's mind is to convert him to a
different belief. "He cannot be
convinced, but only converted."

I have a paperback copy of Hoffer's book
somewhere in my library, but I couldn't find
it when I looked for it yesterday. (It's
probably behind some other book.) But I
quickly found a
free pdf copy on the Internet.
Searching through it for the word "convert," I
found this full quote:

The fanatic
cannot be weaned away from his cause by an
appeal to his reason or moral sense. He
fears compromise and cannot be persuaded
to qualify the certitude and righteousness
of his holy cause. But he finds no
difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly
from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced
but only converted. His
passionate attachment is more vital than the
quality of the cause to which he is
attached.

I also found this quote which
seems very much to apply to President Trump:

Both by
converting and antagonizing, he shapes the
world in his own image.

And this quote also seems to
apply to President Trump:

The proselytizing
fanatic strengthens his own faith by
converting others. The creed whose
legitimacy is most easily challenged is
likely to develop the strongest
proselytizing impulse.

So, we can assume that as
more and more of Trump's absurd beliefs get
shot down and debunked by people citing facts
and evidence, the more Trump will become
convinced that he is right and the world is
conspiring against him.

Of course, if Trump were to be impeached, that
would mean that Vice President Mike Spence
would become President. Some consider
that to be a worse situation: It's better to
have an incompetent President than an evil
President.

Personally, I think it is more likely that
Donald Trump will resign before the end of his
four-year term than that he will be
impeached. If he doesn't find being
President the "fun" and the boost to his ego
that he thought it would be, and if he
constantly suffers setbacks in his plans, he
could just "throw in the towel" and say "The
hell with it." He'd blame others for his
failures, of course.

On the other hand, if President Trump manages to
start a war somewhere, that would mean all bets
are off.

I've been wanting to write a
comment about Donald Trump for weeks, even
though I try very hard to avoid thinking about
him. The problem is: He's on the TVs they
have at the gym where I work out four times a
week. I seem to work out at the exact same
time that Trump's spokesman Sean Spicer gives
his daily news briefing.

When I get home, the evening news every
night seems to have some story about Trump's
latest screwball tweet. And The Late
Show with Stephen Colbert always has some
hilarious comments about the Trump absurdities.

It's all very hilarious.. But, at the same time
it isn't very funny at all.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

A couple years ago, I took a course titled Space, Time & Einstein at the WorldScienceU.com web site. It's taught by Professor Brian Greene of Columbia University in New York City. There were things about the course that bothered me, and I started thinking about Time Dilation and how it really works. There was something in Professor Greene's lecture on
"The Reality of Past, Present and Future"
(Module #8) that bothered me a lot. But then I forgot all about it as I organized my thoughts and worked on my scientific papers on "Time Dilation Re-visualized" and "What is Time?"

Then, while waiting to see if my newest paper on Time Dilated Light will be accepted by a peer reviewed journal, I decided to watch parts of Professor Greene's course over again.

I want to make it clear before continuing that Professor Greene is not teaching anything that other physics professors aren't also teaching. The only difference is the Professor Greene's course and lectures are on-line where I can easily access them.
I soon realized what bothered me about "Module #8"
back then. Prof. Greene was
breaking Time down into "quanta," i.e., into
moments, like the individual frames of a movie. And he was
viewing time as a mathematician would view
time. Plus, the lecture concludes with
Professor Greene saying that, "What this collectively
tells us is that the traditional way we
think about reality - the present is real,
the past is gone, the future is yet to be -
that is without any real basis in physics.What we are really learning from these ideas is
that the past, the present and the future are
all equally real."

If you believe that, then you can also argue
that everything we see may be equally unreal -
from a mathematician's point of view.

Looking over the course schedule, I
noticed that Module #3 was titled "The Speed of
Light." That's the subject of my latest scientific paper. So, I watched Module #3 again.
Wow! It's total nonsense!

Professor Greene explains that the fact that the
velocity of the light-emitting-object (when it
is coming toward you or going away from you)
cannot be added to or subtracted from the speed
of light you perceive is proof that the
speed of light is a "universal constant."It proves no such thing!
It is simply proof that the direction an object is moving does not affect the speed of
light coming from the object. I couldn't
remember any of that from when I took the course
in early 2014. Evidently, it had no
significance to me then. Now I see it is just plain WRONG.
But there was even more nonsense to come. I
then watched the lecture on "Time In Motion"
(Module #5), which is about Time Dilation.
In the screen capture below, he is explaining
how the stationary clock by his hand runs faster
than the moving clock off to his right because
light bounces off mirrors more slowly when the
mirrors are moving while light is being used to
measure time. That is total nonsense,
and it is also a demonstration that has very
little to do with Time Dilation or
reality!

He was teaching his students that Time
Dilation is just "an optical illusion."
He didn't use that term, of course. He was
carefully explaining how a stationary
person will view an object as moving while a
moving person will view the stationary person as
moving. Furthermore, it
is a totally wrong and silly
demonstration. It's twisting
the facts to rationalize a belief! In
reality, light would not
bounce at angles between moving mirrors, light
would move in a straight line and the mirrors
would simply move out of the path of the
bouncing light! Plus, if the speed of light is fixed and universal, a stationary light clock would give the same result on Earth as on Jupiter and in empty space, and it woulddisprove Einstein's theory of gravitational time dilation!

It would have been better if Prof. Greene had
used the explanation of how a ball is perceived
to move if a child on a jet plane tosses it up
and down as the plane moves at 500 miles per
hour. The child will see the ball going
straight up and straight down, while some
imaginary viewer on the ground will see the ball
travel in an arc that covers over a thousand
feet laterally between the time the ball leaves
the boy's hand and the time he catches it
again. It really has nothing
to do with Time Dilation, it only has to
do with Relativity, and therefore it
is the same as saying Time Dilation is just an
optical illusion.

That is where everyone goes wrong!
They do not think of Time Dilation as a real
phenomenon all by itself, they only
think of it in terms of relativity!

And, it was really bizarre when I watched Module
#7, "Time Dilation - Experimental Evidence," in
which Prof. Greene explains how Time Dilation
has been confirmed by people carrying
atomic clocks aboard airplanes, and he explained
how muons exist longer when they are traveling
faster. Professor Greene makes absolutely
no mention of gravitational time dilation.
Nor does he explain who was the "observer" when
the atomic clocks were flown around the
world. He doesn't put 2 and 2 together.

Module #12 was the most absurd of all.
It's titled "The Twin Paradox," and it shows how
preposterous the explanations can get when mathematicians
try to rationalize and distort Time Dilation to
make it fit their equations. Prof.
Greene uses "fraternal twins," George and
Gracie. While George remains on Earth,
Gracie goes off on a space ship to some nearby
star and then returns. That's simple
enough, but Prof. Greene then explains how
neither twin knows who is really moving.
He has Gracie arguing that her space ship is
standing still while George and the planet Earth
moved away from her, while George argues just
the opposite. Prof. Greene then explains
that George is right because Gracie felt
acceleration, which wouldn't happen if she had
been standing still. It's an absolutely silly
explanation of Time Dilation. In what
universe would a space traveler think that she
was standing still while the planet she just
rocketed away from must be moving away from her
and then somehow it reversed course to come back
to her once again? It's idiotic!

It also shows how mathematicians do not care about logic or reasoning. They only care about how the math works. The math says that an astronaut can stand still while the Earth moves away from his rocket, therefore it must be possible. At several points in the course, Professor Greene pauses to explain to his students that if what he is saying doesn't seem to make any sense, then they should take the version of his course that focuses on mathematics.

Yes, why not? After all, in the world of mathematics "garbage in, garbage out" is totally acceptable if the equation looks clever. Nothing needs to be logical or make sense if the mathematics work. Science today is about mathematics, not about logic -- or science.

I not picking on Prof. Greene. He's just teaching the same nonsense that most physics professors seem to be teaching. As stated above, Prof. Greene
merely put his course on the Internet
where I could take it and view the lectures over
again. I should be grateful. It
taught me a great deal, but definitely not what
Prof. Greene intended to teach.

I don't see any way to contact Prof. Greene directly, so I posted a "zinger" question to the discussions for Module #5. Click HERE to see if you can view it. It works for me.

As evidence that other teachers are teaching the same nonsense, here's a video that also uses a "light clock" to explain relativity:

Monday, July 18, 2016

There's "an elephant in the room" that no one seems to want to talk about because it just generates arguments: Light does NOT travel at a "universal speed of light." The "speed of light is different in water, in air, in glass, and in a vacuum. So, there can be no "universal speed of light." It is not even constant in a vacuum.

Einstein's relativity theory was presented as a PRINCIPLED, rather than
a CONSTRUCTIVE, theory. A principled theory is one that begins with
scientific principles and then uses those principles to explain the
phenomena; a constructive theory starts with actual observations and
culminates in theories that explain and reconcile those observations.

Einstein's "principled theory" is interpreted to say that the speed of
light is "constant" throughout the universe and therefore light must cause Time to slow down or DILATE when the object emitting light is in
motion or near a gravitational mass.

A CONSTRUCTIVE theory based
upon observations, however, shows the reverse. The speed of light
changes depending upon the "time" occurring at the source of the light.

Thus, due to gravitational time dilation, light coming from the Sun is
traveling slower than the speed of light as we measure it here on Earth
in a laboratory. And light coming from distant stars is coming at
various speeds due to gravitational and velocity time dilation at the
sources.

Any calculations which assume that the speed of light is
fixed throughout the universe, such as the calculations involved in
Dark Energy, will be incorrect.

A new scientific paper "Time
Dilated Light (A Constructive Relativity Theory)" has been published to
explain everything. It is available at this link: http://vixra.org/pdf/1607.0289v3.pdf

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Are dormant black holes the same thing as dark matter? If not, why not?

It's been bugging me for a long time that dark matter and dormant black holes seem to be the same thing. I'm not a scientist, I'm just a science buff, and I'd never really studied either subject in school. But, I keep asking myself: why would there be two different mysterious substances (dark matter and whatever is at the centers of dormant black holes) that so closely resemble one another?

So, a few days ago, I started doing some focused research. Over the years I've found that whenever I have a science question, it usually has already been asked and answered somewhere on the Internet.

I soon found a web site called "Ask Ethan," which has the exact question I was asking: "Are black holes made of dark matter?"
The page does a very good job of explaining how black holes are thought
to be created. However, it also contains arguable statements like this:

So
initially, when they’re first formed, black holes are pretty much 100%
normal (baryonic) matter, and just about 0% dark matter. Remember
that dark matter interacts only gravitationally, unlike normal matter,
which interacts via the gravitational, weak, electromagnetic and strong
forces.All of this is a fancy way to say that when
normal matter comes into contact with other normal matter, it goes
“splat,” meaning that it can stick together, clump, exchange momentum
and accrue even more normal matter when this occurs. Dark matter, on the
other hand, doesn’t “splat” either with normal matter or with other
dark matter. This is why, when we look at galaxies and clusters of
galaxies, we picture spiral or elliptical galaxies where the normal
matter is confined to a relatively small region of space, but they are
embedded within dark matter halos that extend for maybe thousands of
times the volume of the normal matter.

To me, the first
sentence in the quoted paragraph above is highly questionable. I would assume just the opposite. I would assume that when a black hole is created, it is
100% dark matter, i.e., the normal matter that was ultra-compressed by the
imploding supernova. The supernova turns normal matter into the dark matter that is at the center of a black hole.

The second sentence in the quoted paragraph does a good job of explaining what happens when a supernova creates a black hole consisting
of dark matter. It turns normal matter into a form of matter that is somehow stripped of all the
properties which give it the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. That
would explain how the matter that is at the center of a black hole can
be so highly compressed without causing nuclear fusion.

The last paragraph in the article contains this conclusion:

And there you have it: a quantitative answer to the question of whether black holes are made of dark matter or not. At most
they can only be made of about 0.004% dark matter, and that’s the most
optimistic number that applies only to the most massive ones!

That might be so, but it's definitely not how I see things. So, I looked for more information.

This article attracted my eye: "NASA simulation suggests black holes may make ideal dark matter labs." It seemed to say what I've been thinking, that black holes are "factories" that create more dark matter. They take in normal matter, strip normal matter of its weak, electromagnetic and strong forces, perhaps spewing out those forces in the form of X-rays, and leaving only dark matter behind at the center of the black hole.

Unfortunately, the article begins this way:

While we don’t yet know what dark matter is, we do know it interacts with the rest of the universe through gravity, which means it must accumulate around supermassive black holes.

Huh? Reading the article, I found that it suggests that supermassive black holes concentrate dark matter that was created elsewhere and cause the dark matter particles to collide. That has nothing to do with what I'd been thinking. And there's nothing conclusive in the article, except for another description of some properties of dark matter that I consider to be very important:

dark matter [is] an elusive substance accounting for most of the mass of the universe that neither reflects, absorbs, nor emits light.

That description of dark matter should be compared to this description of dormant black holes I found elsewhere:

Roughly 90 percent of the biggest black holes in the known universe are
dormant, meaning that they are not actively devouring matter and,
consequently, not giving off any light or other radiation.

Think about it. A dormant black hole doesn't reflect light, nor does it emit light, and it doesn't absorb light, it bends the path of light - a process called "gravitational lensing." What need is there to have two different things - dark matter and black holes - if they have the same physical properties?

What's
important to realize about this is that our studies of dark matter
don't just tell us that "it's out there somewhere"; when we study a
galaxy, we learn something about the total distribution of matter within
it. This means that we know the dark matter surrounds galaxies and is not a central object, like a black hole, within galaxies.The
problem with your idea is that black holes are nothing that special,
gravitationally: they're just accretions of matter. They are centralized
in the middle of the galaxy, and according to the laws of gravity, they can't pull very hard on stuff far out at the edge of a galaxy.

Who says black holes are "centralized in the middle of the galaxy"? I'd seen an article which said there could be millions of black holes within
our galaxy. And who says "black holes are nothing that special,
gravitationally"? Just the opposite would seem to be true if a black
hole can be dormant and yet be a massive gravitational source with no
real explanation for what is inside the black hole.

Astronomers
have combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble
Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky
Very Large Array (VLA) to conclude that a peculiar source of radio waves
thought to be a distant galaxy is actually a nearby binary star system
containing a low-mass star and a black hole. This identification
suggests there may be a vast number of black holes in our Galaxy that have gone unnoticed until now.

The article also says,

Because
this study only covered a very small patch of sky, the implication is
that there should be many of these quiet black holes around the Milky
Way. The estimates are that tens of thousands to millions of these black holes could exist within our Galaxy, about three to thousands of times as many as previous studies have suggested.

But
nowhere in the article does it mention "dark matter." It's just about "millions" of black holes which could be in the same places where dark matter is believed to be.

It should seem
"obvious" that dormant black holes and dark matter could be the same
thing. It seems so "obvious" that the question seems to be, What facts about dark matter show that it cannot possibly be dormant black holes?

A
planet-hunting NASA spacecraft has detected no sign of moon-size black
holes yet in the Milky Way galaxy, limiting the chances that such
objects could make up most of the "dark matter" that has mystified
scientists for decades.

Dark
matter is one of the greatest scientific mysteries known — an invisible
substance thought to constitute up five-sixths of all matter in the
universe. It remains so mysterious that scientists are still uncertain
as to whether dark matter is made of microscopic particles or far larger
objects.

and

Over four years, Kepler monitored the brightness of more than 150,000 stars in the Milky Way
to detect regular dimming caused by planets crossing in front of them.
If a primordial black hole passed in front of one of these stars, the
star would become temporarily brighter instead. That's because black
holes warp light around them with their gravitational fields, a
phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

and

Until now, researchers had eliminated the chances that black holes that
are approximately the mass of the moon could make up dark matter.
Kepler's data show no evidence of black holes between 5 and 80 percent
of the moon's mass, suggesting these black holes could not constitute
most dark matter.

However, even smaller primordial black holes, ones less than 0.0001
percent the mass of Earth's moon, could still make up the entirety of
dark matter, Griest said. Future missions — such as the European Space
Agency's Euclid spacecraft or NASA's proposed WFIRST satellite — could
look for smaller black holes than those identified by the Kepler data.

"We've ruled out a range of primordial black holes as dark matter, but
have not ruled them out completely," Griest told SPACE.com. "They're
still a viable candidate for dark matter."

Hmm. That definitely fits with the way I envision things. Most dark matter is supposed to be like a cloud surrounding the Milky Way galaxy. Small black holes wouldn't produce any substantial gravitational lensing effect on distant stars and galaxies.

It's quite possible that I'm totally misunderstanding everything. But, if I'm understanding things correctly, there's also a key to "The Theory of Everything" in this. The key is figuring out how you can strip a particle of normal matter of all of its electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and produce a particle of dark matter that only possesses gravitational force, and thus can be packed like grains of wet sand into a spherical ball of dark matter that is so small that mathematicians can misinterpret it to be a single, dimensionless point of infinite density.

This "Theory of Everything" might also explain "The Big Bang." A gigantic mass of dark matter encountered something that restored electromagnetism, weak and strong forces to the dormant dark matter - like a bowl of nitroglycerin being hit by a bullet. And there could be lots of left-over "unexploded" dark matter floating around.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Last
night I watched Part 1 of "Genius by Stephen Hawking," a PBS series.
Part 1 is titled "Can We Time Travel?" I'd recorded it on my DVR a
couple weeks ago. The entire episode is available for viewing on line
at this link: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365757267/

It
does a fairly good job of explaining how Time Dilation works, and how
we can travel into the future but not into the past. Traveling into the
past would require the creation of another you out of nothing, which is
totally against all we know about science. (No, the universe wasn't
created out of nothing. We just don't KNOW what was there just before
the start of the Big Bang.)

Traveling
into the future doesn't require creating another you. You travel 1
second into the future every second of your life.

In
the PBS show, two of the experimenters take an atomic clock to the top
of a mountain. After spending the night there, they compare their
atomic clock to one at the bottom of the mountain. The clock on top of
the mountain is 20 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) ahead of the
clock at the bottom. So the two people who went up the mountain aged 20
microseconds more than the experimenter who stayed at the bottom of the
mountain. OR, you might say that those who went up the mountain traveled 20 nanoseconds into the future.

Things get
complicated and confusing when one of the people who went up the
mountain talks about using binoculars to look at people at the base of
the mountain and how, "technically, they are in the past." Are they?
If they are in the past, then the experimenter who spent the night at the bottom of
the mountain is also in the past as he meets the two who spent the night
on the mountain. And the people who live at the bottom of the mountain
will be in the past when the people who went up the mountain come down
again and walk among them.

Who is in the
past and who is in the future when everyone of us moves through time
at a slightly different rate than everyone else?

If you think about it a bit (as I did overnight), you realize that if you stand on the street and yell back and forth with someone leaning out a window on the third floor of a building, that person is moving through time at a faster rate than you are. Yet, you can communicate with each other.

So, while Time is passing at different rates for both parties, "now" is evidently somehow the same for both of them. The situation illustrates something I wrote in my "scientific paper" about "Time Dilation Re-visualized." I wrote this about the "twin paradox": Neither twin was ever behind or ahead of the other in time." And the same holds true with two people yelling at each other from different heights. Neither is behind or ahead of the other in time, even though time is going faster for the person who is farther from the center of the earth.

How can this be? It can be because of something I wrote about in my 2nd "scientific paper," which was titled "What is Time?" I wrote: "time is particle spin." If you are on the third floor, the particles that make up your body are spinning faster than the particles that make up my body down at street level. We are both in the "now," which means we can talk with each other even though time is going faster for you than it is for me.

The main problem is putting this into words that can be easily understood. Is it something that others have pointed out thousands of times before, or is this a new way to view Time?

Obviously, the person on "Genius" was wrong. You are not viewing people in the past when you stand atop a mountain and look through a telescope at people at the bottom of a mountain. You are both in the "here and now," even though time is moving at different rates for everyone.

I'm going to have to think about it some more. There's got to be a better way to describe this.